Ladies, stop fussing with your eyebrows. Do you have two of them? OK, we're done.

Time for his friends and family to give this guy some tough love.

Paul uses sarx five times in the first five chapters of 1 Cor., and then in the second half of chapter 6 he switches to soma. As Sargent Schultz would say, "Very interesting!" (Name that show.)

The bad news is that Gerta had a flat tire today. The good news is that it went flat in the garage. That's good because I don't have any means of changing a tire in the car - no jack, lug wrench, not even a way to get the hub cap off. So if that right rear tire had gone flat when I was out this morning I'd have been stuck good. (is there a stuck good?)
I now know that the lug nuts on a '67 VW are metric, but a size that is the same as 3/4". So now I have my breaker bar with a 3/4" socket stowed in the car for next time. Still gotta work on the jack and hub cap removal tool.
I threw the wheel & tire in the van and ran over to a tire dealer nearby and they guy took a look. "Nope. Sorry, can't work on this because the code on the sidewall indicates the tire is 10 years old, and our policy is not to do any work on a tire that's 10 years old or older."
OK, I'm up a creek here if I can't get this tire fixed, and I'm not going to buy one new tire, so I asked him to show me the code. "See these numbers right here?" (369) "They indicate that the tire was manufactured in the 36th week of 1999."
"Ah," says I, "this is only the 10th week of 2009, so the tire isn't yet 10 years old!"
I got the flat fixed. Heh, heh. Chalk one up for the cheap Scot.
But I got a good look at the tire during this process and saw significant checking and splitting on the sidewall, so a new set of tires is in the very near future. Drat! And because they're metric radials - R165-15 - I have limited options for sources.
I also saw a lot of brake dust inside the hubcap. More drat!

The headline on the local news site said the Grand Canyon is 90 years old today. I wish those scientists would make up their minds!
(Turns out it was 90 years ago today that it was made a park. But the headline...)

In other local news, police arrested a man for putting his 1-year old son in the dryer and turning it on. His response? "If I wanted to really hurt him I'd have left him in there longer."
Shall we have a brainstorming session about an appropriate punishment for this animal?

Tiger is out of the match play tournament and the contract talks between Warner and the Cardinals broke off today. He's a free agent tomorrow. What is the world coming to?

Subsistence living means having just enough to survive. Nothing extra, nothing to carry from one day to the next. Henry David Thoreau said all we need is food, clothing and shelter, and those only in sufficient measure to preserve body heat. Anything above that level is luxury. (That's what his Walden Pond experiment was about - living at that minimal level by his own devices.)
By Thoreau's standards anyone reading this blog is incredibly wealthy. And we recognize that a great percentage of the world's population lives dangerously close to that minimal level. If their small garden produces a decent crop of rice and vegetables they will make it through the year with a meal, or even two, each day. It may not be a good meal, with sufficient nutritional elements (especially protein), but it will be enough to quiet the belly. If, however, drought or flood strike they face disease and even death.
As is the case in the animal kingdom, the most fragile, the most susceptible to any disruption in that delicate balance of life are the elderly and the children. For reasons I don't care to ferret out I have always been particularly affected by the suffering of children who, at a most critical stage in their lives, lack even minimal levels of food, clothing and shelter.

At dinner last night Vince told me about the twin boys they adopted from Bolivia last year. They spent most of the first two years of their lives in an orphange - one of the better orphanages in their city, but an orphanage nonetheless. As a result, the twins were small physically and behind developmentally. Now, after just a year of good nutrition, a good night's sleep each night and general nurture the boys have caught up physically, mentally and emotionally.

There are millions of children just like that all over the world. Most have parents who love them as passionately as we love our own children, but that love isn't enough to provide a good meal or warm clothing on a cold night. Through no faul of their own they live in places where it is impossible for them to meet those basic physical needs on a consistent basis. The people in thousands of small villages in Africa and South America live on the other side of the edge. Their children have the distended bellies that accompany malnutrition. What can't be seen are the developmental problems from inadequate nourishment, insufficient protein, no access to clean water.

I don't have any solutions. I don't know how to fix the problem. I've been to Africa and seen it myself; I've talked to friends working with those villagers, friends a lot smarter than me. They don't have solutions, at least not readily attainable solutions.

But it seems to me that there has to be something we can do on some limited basis to help even a few children. Imagine two, five, ten children who will grow up strong and healthy, physically and mentally, because we found a way to get them food, clothing and shelter sufficient for them to thrive.
I know...it sounds so...so bleeding heart liberal! But they're little kids, for Pete's sake. They don't know from liberal or conservative. They just need help.

At the very least it seems wrong on many levels for us to be wringing our hands like the apocalypse is upon us because we can't afford new stuff because our economy has gone south. We don't need more stuff. They need one good meal each day.

Sorry. Didn't mean to get all depressing tonight. Just been thinking about those twin boys, and how many more there are like them out there.
Thank you, Vince & Kathy, for having hearts big enough for those boys.